I found it while going through an old newsgroup, looking for a copy of one of the first poems that I ever wrote. Rec.alt.tentacles, the newsgroup where all the cool kids hung out back in the day. Everyone pretended to be some sort of extra-dimensional being of godlike status. I was Saint Cthylla.

I found the poem I was looking for right away. It stank.

But I ended up wasting a couple of hours going through posts anyway.

All the way to the end. The last post was from an old online friend of mine who went by the handle jazzathoth, like five years after the post before that.

It went like this:

I’m getting married tomorrow. Part of me is undeniably happy about this. But part of me is grieving, and I need to say goodbye to the only people who would understand. They’re all dead now—moved on, I hope. Newsgroups are over. The polls and the stupid posts and the bad poetry—hey, Saint Cthylla! Not that you’ll ever see this—they’re all over. We’ve grown up, started families, failed and succeeded and failed again. I feel like I’m the last one. Probably not. Probably there’s still a lurker out there who’s never posted and still living in his mom’s basement (ha-ha).

Tonight I’m going to pull myself a hot bath, put the straight razor on the side of the tub, and get drunk on whiskey.

In one world, I’ll bleed out in comfort. In this one, I’ll carry on. Or maybe the other way around. Who knows? Does it even matter?

That was the end of the post. I tried looking him up, but of course I couldn’t find him. One way or another, he’d stopped using that handle.

…

Time? Is weird. This one wrote itself in like two minutes, after I spent several days sweating over another one. I actually did spent a LOT of time on rec.alt.vampyres (I think that’s how we spelled it), and posted a lot of poetry there.